


The Inimitable Livers

by La Reine Noire (lareinenoire)



Category: Antony and Cleopatra - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe – 1920s, Drunkenness, F/M, Pre-Canon, Profanity, Prohibition Era, Violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-14
Updated: 2014-05-14
Packaged: 2018-01-24 17:07:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,621
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1612775
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lareinenoire/pseuds/La%20Reine%20Noire
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Cleopatra was never much good at temperance, no matter what the Volstead Act had to say on the subject.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Inimitable Livers

**Author's Note:**

  * For [speakmefair](https://archiveofourown.org/users/speakmefair/gifts).



> Title comes from Plutarch's _Life of Antony_ (28.1), where he describes Antony and Cleopatra's feasts in Alexandria c. 41-40 BC, although since I can't read Greek, I'm assuming the pun is unintentional; epigraph is from _Antony & Cleopatra_, 3.13.121-27. Thanks as ever to my lovely beta-readers, A. and W.

_I found you as a morsel cold upon_ __  
Dead Caesar's trencher; nay, you were a fragment  
Of Cneius Pompey's; besides what hotter hours,  
Unregister'd in vulgar fame, you have  
Luxuriously pick'd out: for, I am sure,  
Though you can guess what temperance should be,  
You know not what it is.

 

Cleopatra was never much good at temperance, no matter what the Volstead Act had to say on the subject. Her eighteenth birthday bash fell on the day Congress officially ratified Prohibition and she'd celebrated with enough champagne to drown the entire city. The papers called it the party to end all parties, although it was clear to anyone with half a grain of sense that the Ptolemy Liquor Consortium had barely scratched the surface of its alcoholic stash.

 

It was only a matter of time before their profits skyrocketed, the Feds be damned. Old Ptolemy had half the state legislature in his pocket, so even when he died (peacefully in his bed) on Christmas morning of 1920, business went on more or less as usual. At least until someone put the idiotic idea into his teenaged son's head that he ought to get rid of Cleopatra and take over the business himself.

 

If it wasn't already clear, Ptolemy Jr. wasn't the brightest bulb in the chandelier.

 

Cleopatra retreated to the family's summer house, where most of the hooch was stored, taking all the goons who knew their heads from their asses in the dark. Once the supply in the townhouse ran out, nobody was remotely surprised when Junior found himself in the middle of an internal battle between two groups of Feds, the ones old Ptolemy had been paying off and the ones who actually did their jobs. His choice to have his thugs take off the head of one of the agents formerly in his dad's pocket with a Bowie knife in an attempt to ingratiate himself with the new top guy Caesar was just the icing on the cake.

 

Suffice it to say, Caesar wasn't impressed.

 

He moved into the family townhouse ostensibly to catalogue all the illegal hooch hiding in the cellars, but everyone knew Junior had run dry. It was Cleopatra who held the keys to what remained and she was safe on the other side of the lake, cheerfully selling to her brother and Caesar at three times the market price.

 

It was only when Caesar threatened to shut the whole operation down that Cleopatra took matters into her own hands. And that's where our story really starts.

 

***

 

The Ptolemy townhouse was a masterpiece of Gilded Age excess, with floors of inlaid marble and Louis XIV furniture. The hooch was delivered to a warehouse several streets away and connected by a network of underground tunnels. Under normal circumstances, it only entered the townhouse through the dumbwaiter, so it's easy to imagine Caesar's surprise when he walked into the master bedroom to find a whiskey barrel sitting on the Aubusson rug in front of the fireplace.

 

And that was before the top came off to reveal Cleopatra, dressed in gold from head to toe, one finger held to her lips. You could have knocked Caesar down with a single feather from her headdress.

 

"I hope you don't mind," she said in a voice like rough velvet. "I couldn't take the risk of coming through the front door. Brother dearest doesn't have the best track record."

 

"Can you control him?" All business, that was Caesar in a nutshell. But even he couldn't stop staring at the way the golden silk hugged the dark curves of Cleopatra's body. "One might say you don't have the best track record either."

 

"Sometimes the only way to keep control of something is to step aside," she replied, fishing a cigarette out of her tiny diamond-studded reticule. "But you'd know that well, wouldn't you? You know my brother killed Agent Pompey as a personal favor to you."

 

"You want me to give him a commendation?" asked Caesar. He pulled out a lighter inlaid with mother-of-pearl and the cigarette's end glowed red.

 

Cleopatra exhaled a cloud of acrid smoke. "A commendation in concrete shoes and a one-way trip to the bottom of the lake would do for me."

 

"What do I get in exchange?"

 

"Full access to my supply at one and a half times the market price."

 

"You'll suck me dry."

 

She had a smile like a panther. "That's a different discussion altogether."

 

***

 

I guess it goes without saying that he shacked up with her. Junior was furious, but Junior didn't last too long after that. Maybe a month or two went by before he conveniently disappeared. They may find him one day if they dredge the lake. Let it not be said that Caesar doesn't take his promises seriously.

 

Cleopatra too, for that matter. She kept him in luxury and liquor for months, an endless parade of parties and entertainments to distract him from his job. Even the Feds tolerated it after he sent them all of Junior's henchmen and started picking on Cleopatra's rivals.

 

Unfortunately for Caesar, however, not all the Feds agreed with his methods. Nor did the other big guys in town appreciate his particular methods. And so it was that on the fifteenth of March, 1922, Caesar settled down to his customary solo dinner at his favorite Italian joint and was promptly stabbed in the back by the maître d'. The other waiters and the kitchen staff joined in for good measure.

 

Turns out Giovanni's Bistro was owned by the Optimates gang and they didn't take too kindly to Caesar having sent their boss to Sing Sing after a Valentine's Day raid. As for Cleopatra, she was holed up in the summer house in a delicate condition, so to speak. Caesar Junior came into the world two weeks after his father's untimely demise.

 

For any other girl, this would have been the end. Pregnant, unmarried, alone, with the Feds bearing down on her and a cellar full of illegal hooch? Not to mention every gang in the city licking their collective chops at the prospect of getting their hands on the Ptolemy fortune. Other girls would have thrown themselves on federal mercy; begged for a quiet cell at the Cook County Jail and a lifetime of staring at the bars.

 

But this was Cleopatra, and Cleopatra made her own rules.

 

***

 

Caesar's contact in Washington was a guy named Antony, and the two couldn't have been more different. Caesar at least gave the impression of austerity. Even when Cleopatra was wining, dining, and fucking him in the evenings, the man somehow walked into the office every day looking as dour as any self-respecting member of the Temperance League.

 

Nobody had any such illusions about Antony. For that, you'd _really_ need to be stupid, and Cleopatra was anything but.

 

It took the Feds months to get themselves together. Caesar had been their top guy, and the goons who murdered him had gone to ground. When Antony finally arrived it was nearly Christmas and the Ptolemy Consortium had been continuing its less-than-legal activities in spite of everything. All of the interim replacements had failed miserably, to nobody's surprise; the whole shebang, after all, had been held together by Caesar's brain and iron will.

 

As for Cleopatra, she kept a low profile. Anyone would have thought she was nothing more than a doting mother if they didn't know better. Maybe that was what Antony thought before he met her. Afterward, it was damn clear he wasn't thinking at all.

 

Not that anyone could blame him. The photos in the paper were masterpieces and even they couldn't compare to the reality of his first meeting with Cleopatra. No whiskey barrels and subterfuge this time. This time, she was queen of the world and didn't care who saw it.

 

She crossed the lake from the summer house on a gilded barge rowed by thirty strapping young men in black tie and surrounded by a flotilla of smaller boats carrying her party girls, each carefully guarded. Above her, firecrackers lit the sky like exploding stars. It was the party to end all parties all over again, and poor Antony didn't even stand a chance. She stepped off the boat in a gown of clinging gold fringe and a white mink stole around her shoulders.

 

"Caesar told me about you," were her first words to Antony. "He said you were the one guy in the agency he trusted."

 

"He said you were the most dangerous woman he'd ever met."

 

"How unflattering." She caught her lip between pearly white teeth. "And do you agree?"

 

Antony drained his champagne, set it on a nearby waiter's tray, and moved closer. She held out one hand to stall him at arm's length. "I always thought danger was underrated. Don't you?"

 

"You may want to rethink that if you plan to stick around here. Look at dear departed Caesar."

 

"I gave the address at his funeral; believe me, I know."

 

"I heard about that." He'd was also the one who caught the two ringleaders two miles from the Canadian border, but it had been his funeral address that made the front page of every paper from Boston to San Francisco, condemning the Volstead Act and Prohibition for the uptick in gang violence across the country. The Temperance League had named him Public Enemy No. 1, but the Feds couldn't touch him because he'd been Caesar's golden boy. "So, tell me, Mark Antony, why are you here?"

 

"I told you." He grinned. "I can't resist a dangerous woman."

 

And that, as they say, would be his epitaph. _Mark Antony, the man who played with fire, consumed in the end with no regrets_.


End file.
